Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present

by Lawrence James

  Every effort was made to assimilate the Indian princes (nominal rulers of three-fifths of the subcontinent) into the British aristocracy. Shared passions for bloodstock and hunting helped, and Indian princes were invited to London for royal celebrations such as jubilees and coronations. Many gravitated towards Britain’s racecourses.

  When maharajas were presented to Queen Victoria, they appeared before their Queen Empress wearing the regalia of pseudo-chivalric orders of knighthood. These had been invented during the second half of the nineteenth century as a device which would bind together Indian rulers and British administrators in a layered brotherhood of honour. As in the Middle Ages, membership of one of these orders was a mark of special royal favour and a reward for loyalty. Most prestigious and, therefore, most desirable was the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, which was open to all Indian princes, Malayan sultans and high-ranking British proconsuls. Awards reflected the recipient’s place in the imperial pecking order. Viceroys, governors and the richest maharajas were Knights Grand Commander of the Order and wore a splendid regalia with fur-lined robes, sashes and collars reminiscent of the British orders of chivalry. Lesser creatures, mostly middle-ranking civil servants, were awarded the Most Eminent Order of the Star of India. Wives of proconsuls, princes and British princesses were awarded the Imperial Order of the Crown of India. Like other British orders, it was also scattered among foreign princes. In 1910 the sisterhood of the Order included the Grand Duchess Cyril of Russia.

  A Maltese order, the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George, was annexed in 1868 and sub-divided into ranks and distributed amongst imperial administrators and dominion politicians. The rank and file were Commanders (CMG), governors of lesser colonies were Knight Commanders (KCMG) and governors of larger colonies Grand Commanders (GCMG). Some wit rendered the initials as ‘Call Me God’, ‘Kindly Call Me God’ and ‘God Calls Me God’. These titles were no laughing matter for those who craved them; the ninth Earl of Elgin, Viceroy of India between 1894 and 1897, wrote that ‘in the colonies, premiers and chief justices fight for stars and ribbons like little boys for toys, and scream at us if we stop them’.27

  The creation of chivalric orders for the Empire was a psychological masterstroke; the imperial honours system ‘tied together’ the white dominions, India and the colonies ‘in one integrated, ordered, titular transracial hierarchy’.28 Its members, whether the Maharaja of Gwalior, the Governor of St Kitts or the Prime Minister of Canada, were an aristocracy distinguished by dedicated service to the Crown rather than land or ancestry.

  Paradoxically, since the 1870s the great majority of the Indian and colonial administrators who received these decorations had acquired their posts through competitive examinations. Most came from upper-middle-class backgrounds and were attracted by what Ralph Furse, who interviewed all candidates for the colonial service, called the ‘prestige and renown’ of the imperial bureaucracy. For most of the first half of the twentieth century, he examined young men who wished to join it, and looked for signs of ‘initiative, hardihood, self-sacrifice, and a spirit of adventure’. A shifting eye or ‘languid handshake’ were disqualifications for entry into the imperial elite.29

  The aristocratic principle made no headway in the white dominions. The constitutions of Canada, Newfoundland, Cape Colony, Natal, New Zealand and the Australian states included no provision for upper chambers filled by hereditary peers. The idea had been mooted for Canada in 1789, when George III suggested baronetcies for the most distinguished members of the legislative council. This plan was briefly revived in 1819, but the Governor-General, the fifth Duke of Richmond, told the Colonial Office that titles were utterly inappropriate for ‘the low description of merchant’ and ‘shopkeepers’ who sat in Canada’s upper house.30 There was another, insurmountable stumbling block: local opinion. Canadians never wanted an aristocracy and said so, vehemently. In 1919 the Canadian government asked George V to suspend peerages to native Canadians, and in 1951 the former Canadian Prime Minister Vincent Massey was banned from accepting an offer of the Garter. Fifty years later the entrepreneur Conrad Black had to forfeit his Canadian citizenship when he accepted a life peerage.

  There was the same antipathy to the notion of an aristocracy in Australia. In the 1820s John Macarthur, the Governor of New South Wales, hoped that the colony’s major landowners might act as a kind of aristocracy, but feared that the idea would outrage the colonists, whose temper was egalitarian and democratic. A third of them were convicts or the descendants of convicts with no affection for British institutions and the premises on which they rested. They and the immigrants who came of their own free will believed that they were settling in a country in which all men and women enjoyed an equality of opportunity, and in which talent counted more than birth. Moreover, in all the dominions the abundance of cheap land meant that its possession was open to all, and so it did not have the same social prestige as it did in Britain. It was the American colonial experience all over again, but this time proconsuls and successive colonial secretaries in London were sensitive to the mood of the settlers. They were fiercely loyal to the mother country and the Crown, but wished to create their own form of society in which there was no place for hereditary privilege or deference to lineage.

  Hierarchies did emerge in all the colonies and were based on achievement and wealth rather than birth. There was a flow of younger sons of peers to Australia, New Zealand and Canada, where they farmed large estates, built fine mansions and spent their spare time hunting, shooting and fishing. In 1871 Trollope remarked that Australian landowners enjoyed lives similar to that of an eighteenth-century squire, although many were self-made men. Had he visited the country, he would have found familiar lines of social demarcation. Until the late 1880s, farmers were segregated from the ‘gentry’ at the annual ball in York, Western Australia.31

  By the close of the century, there were public schools in Australia and New Zealand which, like their British counterparts, upheld the cult of the gentleman and the publishers of Burke’s Peerage were producing a regularly updated Colonial Gentry. Those listed would have been on the invitation lists of the aristocratic governors and governor-generals appointed by the Crown, but they and their wives would have rubbed shoulders with elected politicians who, alone, made the laws in the dominions.

  Customary respect for rank of any kind was not part of the colonial psyche. Its absence was frequently and sometimes dramatically revealed during the First World War, when Australian and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand troops were disrespectful to British officers and showed amazement at the apathetic submissiveness of their British comrades. Antipodean recalcitrance tried the admittedly limited patience of Field Marshal Lord Haig in France. In Egypt, a large body of Aussies and Kiwis faced down and barracked the fiery-tempered Field Marshal Lord Allenby when he castigated them for gross indiscipline.

  Haig and Allenby had made their reputations fighting the wars of Empire and, like many other successful generals, the latter ended his career as a proconsul. Both men were products of the late Victorian army, an institution which, like the navy, was aristocratic in spirit. It was expressed with characteristic brio a few moments before the Dervish attack during the Battle of Abu Klea in 1885, when officers regretted that it would be a pity to die before knowing the result of the Derby. A Punch cartoon of 1909 showed a quartet of elegant cavalry officers (one monocled) enjoying cigarettes and whisky and sodas in their mess nonchalantly discussing a war with Germany. A major observes: ‘It’s pretty certain we shall have to fight ’em in the course of next few years.’ ‘Well, let’s hope it’ll come between the polo and the huntin’, remarks a subaltern. All may have had aristocratic connections, but it is highly likely that one or more was the son of, say, a judge or a senior civil servant. About a quarter of army officers at the time were, but visitors to messes would not have noticed. Whatever his background, an officer could survive only if he assimilated to the aristocratic ethos of his service.

&n
bsp; If one accepts the principle that all modern armed services are a reflection of the nation which employs them, then Britain’s army and navy in 1914 were an anomaly. For the past century, the aristocratic principle had been in retreat in political life, yet it remained entrenched in the mindset of British officers. They were gentlemen, an elevated species, isolated from the civilian world and proud to be so. In 1914 the Labour MP James Ramsay Macdonald reviled those army officers who had made plain their unwillingness to enforce Home Rule in Ireland. Major Alexander Baird, a baronet’s son and veteran of campaigns in Burma and South Africa, rebuked him in an angry letter. Macdonald and his kind served themselves and their parties to the exclusion of all else. By contrast, Baird insisted, ‘The King, Empire and the Flag’ were the lodestars of men like himself who prized honour above expediency.

  For the past hundred years the Empire had become an outlet for aristocratic energies and ambitions. Peers had a monopoly of the viceroyalty of India and dominion governorships, often, like Lord Curzon, alternating imperial offices with cabinet ministries. Beneath them was an imperial civil service whose members were expected to show the frank manliness of gentlemen and who, if their careers flourished, might find themselves bound together in a stratified chivalric order. Many would have dedicated themselves to the perpetuation of the aristocratic principle as mentors to hereditary native rulers who had thrown in their lot with the British.

  The public did not mind. It was broadly in favour of an Empire which gave Britain prestige and power in the world and was periodically excited by wars in distant places. People were largely content that these and the everyday governance of the Empire were delegated to aristocrats and gentlemen. On the whole this arrangement worked very well, although the dismal performances of Lord Raglan in the Crimea and Lord Chelmsford in Zululand provoked sharp criticism. Victorious commanders were lionised by the press, had statues erected to them and were given titles and the wherewithal to support them by Parliament. Lords Roberts of Kandahar and Kitchener of Khartoum were national heroes who could do no wrong, which was why the latter was made Minister of War in 1914.

  Peers in khaki added lustre to the Lords. For the rest of the nobility, imperial and military service were compensation for the slow loss of political power at home and an opportunity for displaying their continued usefulness to the nation. Moreover, in those parts of the Empire which were governed directly, aristocrats could still exercise considerable personal power, giving orders and dispensing patronage. In India, they could even initiate wars, as Lords Auckland and Lytton did against Afghanistan in 1838 and 1878 and Lord Curzon did against Tibet in 1903.

  In fact, the British Raj in India became the last stronghold of the aristocratic principle. It was governed by imported lords, home-grown princes and commoners for whom the absorption of aristocratic conventions and tastes was vital for social acceptance, both by Europeans and natives. Lording it over the natives was perhaps some compensation for the loss of influence at home.

  26

  Always Keep Hold of

  Nurse: Aristocratic

  Twilight

  The twentieth century was an unkind age for the traditional aristocracies of Europe. Historical forces in the form of total war, the expansion of democracy, the replacement of monarchies by republics and the spread of socialist ideologies left them politically and economically vulnerable. There were many casualties. The Russian aristocracy was extinguished by the 1917 revolutions and subsequent civil war, and the nobility of the Baltic states, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia lost titles and lands under the Communist regimes established between 1944 and 1948. German, Austrian, Spanish and Italian noblemen kept their titles and estates, and some embraced Nazism or Fascism, creeds which, although egalitarian on one level, were reassuringly anti-communist. In inter-war Britain, a small but not insignificant coterie of peers lost faith in conventional politics and attached themselves to Sir Oswald Mosley’s Fascist movement and pro-Nazi lobby groups dedicated to Anglo-German cooperation.

  Yet on the whole, the British aristocracy kept its head and its nerve in a country which, by 1928, had become a full democracy and whose political temper became increasingly equalitarian, especially during and immediately after the Second World War. The aristocracy survived, sometimes in reduced circumstances and, by and large, was tolerated even during periods of acute economic distress when class tensions intensified. How did it accomplish what appears to be a remarkable act of survival?

  There are no simple answers to a complex and often emotive question. This chapter analyses some of the reasons why the aristocracy has endured, as well as tracing the further paring down of its constitutional power. In the most general terms, one explanation of the survival of the aristocracy lies in its history. It has always been integral to national life, it has shown versatility and inventiveness in handling its financial affairs, and a capacity for political compromise. It is always worth remembering that the diehards lost in 1832, 1846 and 1911 because there were enough peers who recognised the supremacy of the public will and were willing to come to terms with it. As one peer remarked during the 1911 debate on the Lords veto, his fellows had no wish to lose the goodwill of their countrymen.

  It is also important to remember that the British aristocracy had always been an open and fluid elite. Its ‘aristos’ [i.e. the best] element was never a matter of birth alone, although some peers and their admirers continued to make much of genetic virtue. ‘The Scots have a wonderful pride of race that positively makes itself felt’, wrote a guest at the 1922 London Caledonian Ball, ‘especially . . . where all the most ancient and noble, and the youngest and most beautful of them are collected.’1 Ancestry mattered less in many quarters as the century progressed. In the 1960s one peer remarked with insouciant candour: ‘We got the barony in the eighteenth century . . . one of those political manouevres to pack the House of Lords and get a bill through . . . I forget what on earth the bill was about.’2

  Self-confidence did not wilt in a demotic age, particularly among the older generation. In 1977 the noted diarist James Lees-Milne was struck by the ‘Edwardian patrician accent’ of the Countess of Westmorland. Its timbre seemed to him to epitomise the ancient spirit of the aristocracy. It was ‘a proud voice’ which resonated ‘assurance without swank’ and that ‘devil-may-care, dismissive manner of the well-bred’ which took nothing too seriously.3

  Like the Scottish ballgoers and the diffident peer, the Countess was a member of a clan with its own language, shared pastimes and often common blood. The largely nineteenth-century social and sporting rituals of the London season with its balls, Cowes week, the August exodus to Scotland and autumnal and winter house parties continued. In 1958 Elizabeth II (1952– ) ended the custom of presenting eighteen-year-old debutantes to the reigning monarch, but girls still ‘come out’, many the daughters of new money.

  The aristocracy suffered losses through natural causes and world wars; it was calculated that two hundred direct heirs to titles or major landed estates were killed between 1914 and 1918.4 Numbers were quickly replenished. Following eighteenth-century precedent, senior generals and admirals were ennobled at the end of the war, irrespective of their performance, which in some instances had been dire.

  Mediocre commanders were joined in the post-war Lords by financiers and businessmen who had made fortunes by supplying and arming Britain’s mass armies. Some paid Lloyd George for their titles and he placed their cheques in the coffers of his faction of a now divided Liberal Party, which was in the first stages of terminal decline. These shenanigans provoked an outcry, and blatant trafficking in honours was made illegal. At the turn of the century, there were rumours of an identical scandal which prompted a police investigation into the sale of life peerages by Tony Blair and some of his entourage. No conclusive evidence was found.

  These recent allegations have an extraordinary social significance. Titles have retained their old magic in a country which, since the 19
60s, had flattered itself on the steady advance of egalitarianism. This was suddenly exposed as skin-deep when it became clear that the super rich and successful still craved for peerages and were happy to pay for them, even though they could no longer pass them on to their children. The rigid social hierarchy of Lloyd George’s time may have been eroded, but there were plenty of individuals who believed that their accomplishments and wealth deserved the public prestige and respect which a title still represented. The drive for social equality had not eliminated old-fashioned snobbery. Or, as one peer observed during the 1999 debate on the future of the Lords, ‘Lords would like to be millionaires, but all millionaires want to be Lords.’

  This ambition of millionaires has been legitimised and satisfied by Conservative and, to a much lesser extent, Labour governments. The number of peerage creations spiralled and outpaced natural wastage; there were 596 members of the Lords in 1911 and 851 in 1960. With the introduction of life peers and peeresses in 1957 and 1963 the flow of hereditary creations all but ceased. There was no political mileage in swelling the ranks of the hereditary peers and anyone who wanted the cachet of a title had to be content to accept a life peerage.

  Life peerages were a Conservative measure contrived to assuage critics, mostly on the left, who wished to abolish the Lords as an anachronism rooted in ancient inequality. Life peerages reduced but did not eliminate the inbuilt Tory majority in the Lords and accorded with the old aristocratic principle, insofar as they were distributed among men and women of distinction with a broad range of experience and expertise, often gained beyond the narrow world of politics.